Customers have many options as to which products and services they choose to spend their money on. For example, travelers can choose from a variety of airlines, hotels, and rental car companies to use on any given trip. Based in part on the rise of the Internet, customers are able to quickly determine the products and services having the best price. Therefore, it is important for a company to develop customer loyalty to attract and retain customers if they are unable or unwilling to provide their product or service at or below the price offered by their competitors.
One popular way that companies have developed to improve customer retention is through loyalty or incentive based programs, where customers earn reward points for purchasing the services or products offered by a company. Such loyalty programs are commonly used by airlines and hotels to reward frequent flyers or hotel guests. Loyalty programs are often popular among business travelers who are often reimbursed for the cost of the hotel or flight, but are permitted to retain any rewards earned.
While these loyalty programs are effective, they may be difficult to manage for users. For example, a business traveler may use a website affiliated with their preferred airline to book a flight for a business trip, a second website affiliated with their preferred hotel to book a hotel room for the business trip, and yet another website affiliated with their preferred rental car company to book a car for the trip. The total corpus of information concerning the user's trip is now stored across the three different websites forcing the user to log into each separate websites to retrieve desired information about the trip. For example, if the user forgets the address of their rental car location, they have to log into the website of the rental car company, or if the user needs the phone number of their hotel they have to log into the website of their hotel. Even with advanced technologies such as smart phones, accessing the disparate sources may be time consuming and frustrating.